Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Africa


Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa

#artificialintelligence

We are looking at showcasing and sharing a number of Data Science & Machine Intelligence use cases by members of the MIIA community. MIIA members who would like to present is welcome to send an email to [masked]. Although we have a start time of 5pm for this event (with event registration starting at 4:30pm), we'll probably start at about 5:15pm to give enough people the chance to get there. See also map below for secure parking for Barclays Rise visitors.


Tomorrow's accountant will be a business advisor rather than a number cruncher

#artificialintelligence

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing maturity of cloud-based business software promise to dramatically change the role of the accountant over the next five to 10 years. Savvy professionals should already be reskilling themselves in anticipation of the shift in the market. The Finance Indaba is taking place today and tomorrow – it's the perfect platform for finance professionals to gear up and learn about the changing accounting world from leaders in the industry He says that the arrival of smart software bots, paired with the affordability of cloud-based business applications, will change the way that accountants work as vividly as the first spreadsheet and accounting software packages did. "Financial software is getting smarter, more affordable and easier to use, so more and more of the admin accountants typically do for the business is becoming automated," Cohen says. "What's more, intuitive software paired with AI and other new developments, could empower small business owners do more of the tasks they used to entrust to an accountant."


Humanitarian efforts benefit from drones as ethical debate continues

PBS NewsHour

On March 12 2016, children in Malawi look on amazed in the community demonstration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) flying in Lilongwe. The Ministry of Health and UNICEF launched the first six-mile auto programmed flight in a trial to speed up the testing and diagnosis of HIV in infants. It can take hours to travel even short distances along the ramshackle dirt roads of Malawi, an impoverished African country with high rates of HIV, a virus that has taken a particularly acute toll on children. With limited trips from remote towns and villages – where large swaths of the populace live – to one of country's sparsely scattered hospitals in the capital city of Lilongwe, where they get essential medical services, testing for the virus can be an arduous task. But a new experiment conducted this year by United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) shows the potential for drones to help change that scenario amid debates over ethical issues and at a time when developing countries around the world are increasingly turning to the aerial devices to assist with humanitarian efforts.


Victor Famubode: The political economy of technology and artificial intelligence in Africa - The ScoopNG

#artificialintelligence

From driverless cars to online financial infrastructure payments, Artificial Intelligence obviously will be the heart of the next industrial revolution. The wave of globalisation and democracy cannot be overlooked regarding their contributions steering policy integration. Both concepts will play vital roles towards integrating the African continent under an umbrella perceived to end humanity (Artificial Intelligence). The rise of machines and robotics in high-income economies has been a contested discourse by philosophers, economists, tech geeks and policy makers. There is a rising belief it would steal jobs and render humanity useless and even economists seem not to be certain about the relevance of labour in this period. Immediately Japan was announced as the host of 2020 Olympics, what would strike one's mind is the presence of robotics during the famous sporting event.


Predicting The Status of Waterpoints

@machinelearnbot

He took NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program between Sept 23 to Dec 18, 2015. The post was based on his fourth class project(due at 8th week of the program). Kaggle is the most famous organization dedicated to Data Science competitions, but there are others. One of these is Driven Data. Beyond the difference in visibility, a point of divergence between Kaggle and Driven Data is that the latter's competitions often have a social focus as opposed to the former's usual business leanings.


Endangered Animals Are Being Poisoned In Zimbabwe. Drones Are Flying To The Rescue.

Huffington Post - Tech news and opinion

Instead of using guns to kill elephants and rhinoceroses, some poachers in Zimbabwe have begun poisoning the animals' water with cyanide? a practice some activists believe could be curbed by flying drones over parks in the African country. Although drone usage hasn't been proven to stop the killing of elephants, anti-poaching program Air Shepherd is prepared to use monitoring to help stop people from poisoning animals. The organization already flies drones over parks in three southern Africa countries at night to patrol for gun-toting poachers. The suspected cause of death, according to news reports, is cyanide, which has been used to kill hundreds of elephants in recent years. "The biggest problem that we have is that ivory is a business," said Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the CEO of UAV and Drone Solutions, a business partnering with the Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation to run the Air Shepherd program. "The poaching of the animals is the last thing that people want to solve.


The Cure for Cancer Is Data--Mountains of Data

WIRED

A few years ago Eric Schadt met a woman who had cancer. It was an aggressive form of colon cancer that had come on quickly and metastasized to her liver. She was a young war widow from Mississippi, the mother of two girls she was raising alone, and she had only the health care that her husband's death benefits afforded her--an overburdened oncologist at a military hospital, the lowest rung on the health care ladder. To walk into such a facility with stage 4 metastatic disease is to walk back in time to the world of the unmapped human genome, when "colon cancer" was understood to have a single cause instead of millions of causes resulting in unique variations, when treatment was the same bag of poison, whether you were in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, or Timbuktu. A time without big data, machine learning, or hope.


Artificial intelligence and rural African power

#artificialintelligence

In the West, we rely on the grid, which provides most people with ample power. In off-grid communities such as those in large parts of rural Africa, energy is a highly valued resource and consumers are much more aware of energy efficiency. The limited energy that is available is disproportionately expensive and innovative solutions, such as small-scale renewable power, that cannot yet compete in the West, are gaining ground where, compared to the cost of the fossil fuels they replace, they are seen as a bargain. Developments such as small solar home systems are bringing power for the first time to millions of off-grid consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to technological advances in LED lights, batteries and mobile payment, creating what many are referring to as the "clean energy revolution" in rural electrification. While LED lighting and phone charging were the first volume application in this rapidly evolving market, consumers of the clean energy revolution in Africa want, and increasingly demand, more. Customers now expect to be able to access the latest technology, media and communications through the growth of the largely familiar pay-as-you-go technology, even in areas where there is no little or no grid access.


Is The US Going To War? Somalia And Al-Shabab, Al Qaeda Affiliate, Targeted By Obama Administration

International Business Times

Amid Syria's five-year-old civil war and Iraq's push to expel the Islamic State group from its major cities, President Barack Obama has quietly reneged on promises of "no boots on the ground" in recent years. But another American ground battle lingers just outside of the spotlight, in Somalia. A campaign involving private contractors, drone strikes and up to 300 U.S. Special Operations troops against the al Qaeda offshoot group al-Shabab has been escalating there over the past year, the New York Times reported Sunday, citing "senior American military officials." Operations in the country, located in the eastern "Horn of Africa," are expected to expand, according to the Times, on top of efforts that have involved the Navy's SEAL Team 6, weekly raids with troops from nearby Kenya and Uganda and interrogation of prisoners. The American use of force there hasn't exactly been welcome. At the end of September, for instance, Somalia's Security Minister Osman Issa accused the U.S. of killing 22 Somali soldiers in an airstrike, the result of bad intelligence information.


Deep Learning for Population Genetic Inference

#artificialintelligence

With the advent of large-scale whole-genome variation data, population geneticists are currently interested in considering increasingly more complex models. However, statistical inference in this setting is a challenging task, as computing the likelihood of a complex population genetic model is a difficult problem both theoretically and computationally. In this paper, we introduce a novel likelihood-free inference framework for population genomics by applying deep learning, which is an active area of machine learning research. To our knowledge, deep learning has not been employed in population genomics before. A recent survey article [1] provides an accessible introduction to deep learning, and we provide a high-level description below.